Well yeah, this may be true if you go blindly throwing curses at people without first researching that person but that’s a pretty rookie move IMO.
An adept would not approach a curse like that. An adept would first get to know his/her target including using divination and asking their guardians and familiars to scope the target out before hand, finding out if the other person is secretly involved in magick (if you don’t already know that about the person), finding out if the target is protected by ancestors, familiars and guardians of their own, or even if the person is not a magician but maybe they know some very powerful people that can shield the target and reflect the attack back at the magician creating it.
So what I’m saying is that anyone who is experienced enough to know that being cautious is crucial, would know not to go throwing curses at people without doing prior research. Sometimes the most powerful and dangerous magicians can look like the nice church-going old lady from up the street, whereas those goth looking wannabe vampire kids that actually dress the part and scare the hell out of everyone that walks past them usually can’t even do the most basic forms of magick.
So technically, if you know your target it is easier to curse that person than it is to go picking up the shattered pieces of your own psyche and your own health as a result of cursing someone that is more experienced than you are, someone who threw the curse back at you ten times over when you were least expecting it. You are speaking as if every magician just curses without thinking and ends up discovering what damage has been done after it’s too late. For those people, yeah it would be harder to heal than to curse because they didn’t first research their target to see what they’d be up against.
But for those who do research, either option could go smoothly because that magician, if the tables are reversed and someone else is trying to curse them, they could have some powerful ‘return to sender’ shields in place and also be working with familiars that will tell them what kind of curse was attempted on them, so they will know exactly what kind of spell to use to heal themselves if need be.[/quote]
I agree with what you are saying here, but it’s not exactly what I am getting at. My main thing with cursing is that, unless your motivations are somewhat petty, there are, at least in 90% of cases, solutions that are far more non-threatening and complete to the problem that might motivate a curse. It’s not so much of taking the time to research who you are cursing that I am questioning. I’m pretty sure people do that in most cases, so in this sense I do not think that this sort of “blind” action is invested in during at least 75% of cursing attempts. When I refer to blind cursing, I talk more so about people not taking honest time to assess their own personal motivations for cursing people, and really taking the time to figure out if that mode of action is the best way to do it.
Let’s face it, the people who are subject to cursing are not very likely to be practiced magicians themselves. As such, many people are looking to curse individuals who have no active command of their own personal forces, even if they are powerfully working for that person. So when I look at a situation where a person is looking to curse, I am asking myself, “What is their problem?” In these situations, there are two groups: The group of people who are looking to remove or protect themselves from a perceived threat, and the psychopaths. The second group can fuck off, and we don’t gotta worry about them because they will beat their own ass. But the first group… this is the one that honestly has to do some serious assessment of their own personal motivation.
If, for example, a person is getting bullied at school, or at work or at insert the social arena, is it really the best course of action to just curse the person or group of people bullying the individual? Has that person taken the time to think about whether or not the problem is just those people, or if it’s a problem with them being marks for bullies in general? Have they taken the time to assess their own personal feelings of self-worth, and whether or not they are actually bullying themselves through their own internal self-assessments?
To me, with magick in general, it has a lot more to do with the person who is operating, and minimally to do with the perceived outside. So a person goes cursing things like bullies, and then they find themselves suffering without knowing why. Now we have looked at the idea of this being due to the protection that targets have, but what if the person who is cursing doesn’t realize that they are unwittingly a target of their own curse? Aren’t many people who are bullied hounded by a cadre of self-defeating thoughts that make them easy pickings for outside bullies? Aren’t those thoughts and internal ideas bullies themselves, and since they are things that are created and fed by what you accept, aren’t you your own bully, and perhaps your own biggest bully in the particular situation, and in other bullying situations in general?
So when I am talking about a stone statue or a 300 lb vase, I am talking more so about the weight of the problem itself. But if that problem is attached to things that are 90% self-created, and a person just goes smashing it thinking that it’s an external problem, what’s liable to be the consequence of that? That’s the type of thing I am talking about with the danger of cursing more so than worrying about the protection of others being against you.
In consideration of that, I figure it would be a lot smarter to root out what is causing a particular situation in the first place, rather than honing in a one specific manifestation of a problem. It’s like disease: cursing seems like a method of treating symptoms, but rarely is that symptom the entirety of the disease itself. If I am being bullied, I wouldn’t give a shit about this one bully or group of bullies if I am just going to be bullied again. I’d much rather make myself immune to bullying, and change whatever personal configuration that attracts bullies to me. This, in my honest experience, is WAY easier and way more complete of a solution than cursing some clowns.
So as a solution-based modality, I can’t ever really recommend it. This is why I feel that, if a person is trying to curse, there are underlying desires for revenge, to see those who “wronged” you hurt. Now people are free to feel what they want, but those motives are just asking for more problems. And as a magician, where I feel it is extremely important for individuals to take personal responsibility for everything goes on in their life, those type of motives don’t really appear to aid in empowering consciousness of personal accountability.
That’s just my opinion, of course. People will do what they are going to do, but that’s just my take on cursing.